If I am to grant Bill Kristol his thesis that “power, like nature, abhors a vacuum,” and that a war-weary America has opened the door for Putin to step into the breach, who then should I blame for the war-weariness other than Bill Kristol himself?
Is it not he, and his merry band of neoconservative hawks, who so convincingly urged on our foreign policy establishment to ever-greater thirst for Iraqi blood? Have they not opposed any cessation of violence (on America’s part) in Afghanistan? The country followed Bill Kristol’s advice, and here we are.
He is very confident that the right kind of conservative leader can quickly repair our war-weariness. “Will no brave leader step forward to honorably awaken us from our unworthy sleep?” he says.
Putin’s actions in Ukraine do pose a challenge to progressives, who must begin to think carefully about America’s proper posture in the world. Where we move back, other powers may move in, and often with unfortunate and destabilizing results.
Yet, while it is true that the world is more brutish than we might like, and that American power is more essential than we might wish, it’s Bill Kristol and his cohorts who have done the most damage to both American legitimacy and Americans’ appetite for playing the Great Game.
We ought to be able to stand up for Ukraine without sounding like the rankest hypocrites, but that isn’t possible because we followed Kristol’s advice. We ought to be able to condemn al-Assad in Syria with some real moral authority, but we can’t because of Gitmo, and Abu Ghraib, and waterboarding.
So, Bill Kristol should remove the beam from his own eye, and then he can remove the mote from ours.
